North Dakota Republican governor and businessman Doug Burgum announced Monday that he is suspending his 2024 presidential campaign after struggling throughout his whole bid to get name recognition from voters.
Burgum’s announcement came after he did not meet the requirements to qualify for the third GOP debate last month and seemed unlikely to meet them for the debate scheduled for Wednesday.
Burgum indicated in a statement that the Republican National Committee’s requirements to compete in the primary debates played a pivotal role in his decision to end his campaign.
“The RNC’s clubhouse debate requirements are nationalizing the primary process and taking the power of democracy away from the engaged, thoughtful citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire,” Burgum said in the statement. “The RNC’s mission is to win elections. It is not their mission to reduce competition and restrict fresh ideas by ‘narrowing the field’ months before the Iowa caucuses or the first in the nation New Hampshire primary.”
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Burgum, who joined the race in June, recently said that if he’d known of the RNC’s debate thresholds, he would have probably not run for president.
“The amount of resources to run a national effort is very different than the resources to run in state,” Burgum said last week on a New Hampshire radio show. “And also, you’ve got a limited amount of time as well. So, if you’re someone who’s getting into this, as we did on June 7, you know, where you don’t have national name recognition because you haven’t held national office you haven’t, you know, been a pundit on a national television program.”
Even though Burgum was able to qualify for the first two GOP debates, he failed to reach the RNC threshold for the third debate held in Miami, Florida, last month.
Before Burgum took office as North Dakota governor in December 2016, he was a successful businessman who founded a software company he later sold to Microsoft for over $1 billion. After the sale, Burgum stayed on as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Group until he stepped down in 2007.
In 2008, he co-founded a venture capital company called Arthur Ventures that focused on investing in clean technology and life sciences.
About 80% of Burgum’s campaign was self-funded. According to his Federal Election Commission filings, he invested $12.2 million in his campaign and raised a total of $15.1 million since he announced his candidacy.
After Burgum gave $20 gift cards to anyone who would donate a $1 to his campaign — a strategy to help him qualify for the first Republican debate by helping him reach the 40,000 unique-donor threshold, a Forbes analysis said his net worth was approximately $100 million.
